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Monday, April 14, 2014

On Being a Colorblind Artist, Part 3: Adulthood

For the next ten years, I did not
paint.

Even my drawing became sporadic,
reduced to the occasional birthday card or half-hearted scribbles on
envelopes and Post-it notes.

I threw myself into all sorts of
pursuits, some of them creative, some not, but none of them seemed to
fit. I traveled widely: Russia, England, Zimbabwe, South Africa,
Canada, Uzbekistan. I worked long hours paying off my student loans
in coffee shops and bookstores. I tried my hand at writing, film
editing and silversmithing. I peddled diamonds and Rolexes. I taught
English as a second language. I joined the Peace Corps.

But no matter what I did, something was
missing.

In the grander scheme of things, I
believe we are all put on this planet for a purpose; and sometimes
that purpose isn't clear until we're ready for it. In my
case, I had several dark experiences in my past that I had to address
first. Yet as I began to battle and overcome these dragons one by
one, I found (much to my surprise) that the desire to paint was still
there, placed deep in my heart. And not just in line, or form, but
in color. Full-on vibrant color.

Of course I could've ignored this
unlikely impulse. I could've played it safe and worked in, say, pen
and ink. But the thing is, I dosee color, just not all
of it, and I happen to enjoy it. To restrict myself to just black and
white would've been more than a compromise – it would've been an
admission of defeat. Whether they admit it or not, most artists
create for more than just themselves. They want their efforts to be
experienced and shared with others. If I didn't care about mistakes
and only painted for myself, my work might be acceptable to me, but
it'd be a lesser experience for others.

“Oh, but it would be so interesting
to see what you would make!” a lot of well-intentioned people say.
“Such-and-such an artist uses wild color schemes and gets away with
it.”

What they fail to grasp is this: an
artist has to possess an even BETTER sense of color in order to make
“wild” color choices harmonize in their work. There has to be an
underlying sense of intent. I don't set out to paint trees pink or
skies green on purpose. I don't even see them as pink or
green. I see them as “brown” and “blue”. Asking a
colorblind artist to paint in unnatural colors is like asking a
pianist to transpose a concerto on a piano that's missing keys.
Sure, it could be done, but it wouldn't be enjoyable.

I honestly thought I'd painted the waterlilies green...

So when I felt that I should attempt to
paint again, I knew the odds were stacked as high against me as they
ever were; yet I'd finally been given the strength to try.

My first challenge was to find some
proper instruction. It turns out that, while other colorblind
painters certainly do exist, colorblind painters who teach are super
rare – and secretive. Just as a dancing instructor or running
coach wouldn't openly advertise that they had a limp, a colorblind
art instructor wouldn't mention their deficiency, either. So I never
found one.

I attended several classes and
workshops, but it was a bit crazy-making, both for me and the
instructors. At first I thought I could get away with not mentioning
my colorblindness, but in the end it always came out. You see, most
experienced painters use color by instinct, and that instinct can be
difficult to teach to beginners, much less to someone like myself. A
typical interaction would go like this:

Instructor: “Okay, so let's just mix
up some of this, like so, and....”

Me: “I'm sorry, what were those three
colors that you just put together?”

Instructor: “It's not a formula. Your
palette doesn't even have to be the same as mine. You just need to
get an overall feel for the grass over there.”

Instructor: “Um, yeah. I think
that's what I just used. But look, there's a ton of ways you can mix
that color. It's not about local color. It constantly changes
with the light.”

Me: (Nodding and quickly writing down
the pigments, the percentage used, the weather, and the current time
of day, etc.) “Of course.”

A failed attempt at a portrait. Fortunately, the model fainted before I could finish it.

If instructors were of limited color
help, books were far worse. Each one called for a completely
different list of paints, skipped steps, and would often omit the
pigment's actual name. Why is this problematic? Because one company's
“Hansa Yellow” could be another company's “Transparent Yellow”,
“Nickel Azo”, “Arylide Yellow or “Lemon Yellow”. So the
actual paint the author used was unknown to me. Was it green-yellow?
Orange-yellow? And what does that even mean? According to my eyes, many
yellows look identical. Same goes for blues. They might be lighter or
darker, but not “warm” or “cool” or “strong” or “dull”
as so many describe them. So mixing paints was an exercise in
madness and I ended up buying countless tubes of paint in hopes that
I'd hit on the right combination.

I was steadfast in my quest, though,
and eventually happened on a book that wasn't useless: The
Watercolorist's Essential Notebook by
Gordon MacKenzie. It was a revelation. For the first time, it was
explained to me that it wasn't a crime to use greens straight out of
the tube, and that pigment names also had particular number
designations that I could look for on the labels. He also described
the varying qualities of pigments, listing which ones mixed well with
which, and which ones resulted in a dull muddle. Around the same
time, I also came across Bruce MacEvoy's personal research project at
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html.
In this staggeringly comprehensive website I discovered descriptions
of nearly every known pigment in the universe, complete with diagrams
and scientifically tested descriptions. In fact, this site has been
such a boon to my painting process that I often wonder what I'd do if
it suddenly went offline.

Color swatches

Eventually, I began to paint not just
with others, but on my own. Ever-so-tentative at first, but as time
wore on I became more confident. Each painting I made, I looked
things up, made swatches of colors and got brave enough to ask for
help. I wrote down what worked and what didn't work. I made a lot of
spectacularly bad paintings. In fact, I STILL make a lot of bad
paintings...but now I have a better idea of why they went
wrong, and they are getting less frequent. In fact, the one thing
I've been hearing more and more is, “Colorblind? I never would have
guessed!”

Note: This last post ran so long
that I had to cut it in half(!) Stay tuned next week for “On Being
a Colorblind Artist, part 4: How I Paint.”

1 comment:

I'm really loving this series, and find myself strangely envious of your view on the world. I wouldn't say exactly that I didn't know you were colorblind, but more appropriately that I am still surprised, because I really love your use of color. I've often been frustrated by color in art also, but from the opposite perspective. Using color effectively is almost never using all the colors under the rainbow, and learning how to remove the noise and focus on the essential is often difficult. I'm so glad you've found your art again and are pursuing it, and sharing both your view of the world and your path there.

Also, on a side note, there was a really interesting interview I heard on NPR's TED Radio Hour a couple of months ago. I don't know if you caught it, but I was fascinated (the first interview in the link)